Material Girl, Mystical World: The Now-Age Guide for Chic Seekers and Modern Mystics. Ruby Warrington
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Karma
Part II: Health & Well-Being
5. Confessions of a Reluctant Yogi
Part III: Love, Sex & Relationships
8. Calling in Number One (On Self-Love)
9. Your Period as Sacred Goddess Code
11. Finding My Divine Feminine
Part IV: Fashion & Beauty
12. Spiritual Style Icons (A Numinous Best-Dressed List)
13. The Inner Beauty v. Botox Debate
14. Get Your Rocks On: Crystals as Wearable Healing
Part V: People & Parties
15. Healing Is the New Nightlife
16. Feeling the Plant Medicine Peer Pressure
17. Lost and Found at Burning Man
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Glossary of Now Age Terminology
About the Publisher
COMING OUT OF THE SPIRITUAL CLOSET
Brooklyn, NY. October 31, 2013.
So what exactly do you wear to a séance? It’s Halloween; my friend, the psychic Betsy LeFae, has invited me to a “Dinner with the Dead” at her apartment in Williamsburg, and I’m having a wardrobe crisis. On Facebook, my feed is filling up with people dressed as sexy nuns. But if Halloween fancy dress is about laughing in the face of death, I’ll hopefully (gulp, really?) be spending my evening looking death in the face and asking who it thinks it is. Instead of a “meet the parents” outfit, I need a look to potentially meet and greet my dearly departed ancestors.
My instinct is to play it superwitchy and dress head to toe in black, even though I know it’s considered more high vibe among spiritual circles to wear white. Apparently it raises your “auric radiance.” In the end I settle on a long black Agnes B skirt I picked up at a consignment store in the East Village (just witchy enough), and I pair it with a sleeveless white silk blouse. A mouth of MAC’s bright red Lady Danger lipstick completes the look. It’s what I always wear when I want to feel properly pulled together. It’s the same shade Alexa Chung wears (she told me when I interviewed her once), and I think it makes me look like a lady. A dangerously smart, sexy, and pulled-together lady.
In the street outside I can already hear the sounds of the impending zombie apocalypse as my fellow New Yorkers congregate outside the bars to smoke and flirt. Getting wasted and fornicating in the face of death is the other big theme of the evening, after all. Meanwhile, I think about all the spirits I won’t be drinking but will instead be inviting to deliver their spine-tingling messages tonight, and I pick up the tray of tamari-roasted vegetables I’m taking as my dish for the potluck supper we’ll be eating in silence after the séance. The idea is we’ll be dining with any deceased ancestors who’ve decided to join us.
All of which, if I’m honest, has become a pretty standard Friday night for me.
Seriously, you should hear some of the conversations I have with my girlfriends these days. Women like Madeline, who used to work at Nylon magazine but left to go to psychic school in L.A. and is convinced she’s a reincarnated mermaid. Raquel, a former fashion stylist who’s devised a spiritual detox program to open your third eye and cleanse your chakras along with your colon. Or Marika, a financier turned modern shamanic practitioner who mainly wears Isabel Marant and introduced me to my spirit animal last summer.
And no, I didn’t meet these women on some mind-bending plant medicine retreat in Peru. Although that’s probably on their vacation wish list, along with swimming with dolphins, a trip to Burning Man, and a ten-day silent meditation Vipassana. Nor do my friends and I waft around in purple caftans (unless they’re by Mara Hoffman), grow out our armpit hair, and imbibe only homegrown kombucha. Rather, the women I have been known to refer to as my coven are the hip, switched-on denizens of New York, L.A., and London, cities fast embracing the dawning of what I like to call the Now Age. As in New Age … but given a totally modern upgrade for NOW. And I connected with many of them after I launched my website, The Numinous, an online magazine where Material Girl meets Mystical World.
The by-way-of-intro e-mail often goes something like: “OMG at last. A platform that speaks to my twin passions—fashion and astrology!” And then we get into how a fascination with all things esoteric has opened up whole new worlds of inquiry about what it means to be thriving as a twenty-first-century woman.
Because from Ayurveda to the tarot and Tantric healing, on any given evening in Brooklyn, Venice Beach, Shoreditch, Sydney, or Berlin, Now Age curious seekers are flocking to workshops to waken our Divine Feminine, sitting in ceremony to welcome the New Moon, experimenting with shamanism, and getting seriously high on the vibes, man. The night I attended a pranayama breathwork session in a tepee in a park in Williamsburg last summer, I didn’t come down for days.
Which sounds pretty woo-woo, I guess. But if embracing the New Age in the 1960s meant changing your name to Echo, rejecting your traditional upbringing, and running away to live on an ashram, in the Now Age, choosing to check out a more spiritual worldview is no longer seen as incompatible with an appreciation for fashion. If anything, the fact that we’ve evolved into such an exaggeratedly material, hypervisual, and device-dependent world has given these ancient human technologies a newfound allure. If social media, for example, has created what some people are calling a “disconnection epidemic,” then esoteric practices like astrology and meditation become a (necessary) way to reconnect—sure, to each other, but not least to ourselves.
And on the flip side, spending half our lives in the alternate reality we casually refer to as the Internet (I mean, let’s take a step back for a minute; everything being “online” now, and existing somewhere in the Cloud, is actually seriously sci-fi) means we also get to investigate these Now Age practices from the comfort of our own living rooms. Not to mention the freedom it’s given us to totally blur the lines when it comes to what a person who identifies as “spiritual” should look like. Um, have you checked out Miley Cyrus’s IG feed lately? #GODDESS. The week I’m writing this, even Khloé Kardashian had penned an essay on her spiritual leanings for Lena Dunham’s “Lenny” newsletter.
Enter mass meditations that devolve into networking events, spiritual speed-dating, and my friends and I discovering the joys of the “healing hang date.” Also celebrities like Russell Brand (God bless that man) discovering yoga and going from Hollywood wannabe and recovering addict to